'TWIXT CUP AND LIP
"Warum sind benn die Rosen so blass?
* * * * *
Mein liebes Liebchen, sprich,
D sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,
Warum verliessert du mich?"
HEINE.
Steven and his host sat opposite each other, equally mute. After his spurt of hilarity, the Burgrave had gradually fallen into a moodiness fostered by draughts of an alarming variety of wines. Sunk into himself, his heavy chin upon his chest, he glared straight before him with suffused eyes, blood-injected—a sodden mass of helpless resentment.
Fastidious Steven, ever more wrapt in disdain and aloofness, had perforce to avert his gaze from the degraded spectacle. How came such a flower as his Sidonia grafted upon so coarse a stock? He rejoiced, with a glow of intimate self-approbation, that he was carrying her away to fitter surroundings. To whom might they not have wedded her? To some sproutling, no doubt, chosen by the Burgrave—by yonder sot! Into what brutal arms might they not have cast her—the pure child of the cave night?
Something called him from his musings: it was the measure of an odd little tune, played half-sourdine, half-pizzicato. Suddenly the image of a rosy mountain-side, a gold-dusted plain spreading away towards sunset, the gloom of a forest background, sprang before his mind. He saw in the midst of that scene a gloomy youth seated on a milestone, a disabled chaise, a grey horse ... and up the hill, advancing towards him, the vagabond fiddler. A broken sun ray flashed back from the yellow varnish of his instrument ... a robin sang ... the white horse cropped the leaves of young grass, with contented munching sound. The stream ran tinkling like secret laughter. Oh, what strange things had been brought into this traveller's life through the breaking of a linchpin on the Thuringian highway! He sprang to his feet. Surely Geiger-Hans was calling him!—The Burgrave never even shifted his eyes to watch his new nephew go.
Steven found the fiddler at the head of the downward path; and though he was seated, there was an air of travel about him. He was alone. The charm of his music had no power that day at Wellenshausen; fleshpots and drinking cans filled the household mind. The young man's heart contracted; he had learned to feel strange attachment for his strange comrade.
"I knew you were playing a good-bye," he cried. "Will you not wait and see us go?"
The fiddler's eyes flung his glance, uneasily, to where the white road cleared the shadowy green of the fields below and dipped into the dark bluish lap of the forest.
"No, no; I must go!" he answered, wildly, Steven thought.
"Without seeing Sidonia again?" exclaimed the young man.